Fifty-six years ago today, the greatest James Bond movie ever made, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, premiered. I have written about OHMSS extensively here and also here (as part of my Definitive Ranking Of All The Bond Films), so I won’t go into it in detail in this post…but it’s the one Bond film that takes place specifically at Christmastime, and it actually has its very own Christmas song, written for the film by composer John Barry and lyricist Hal David. The song, “Do You Know How Christmas Trees Are Grown”, in heard briefly in the film when Bond is in a Swiss village trying to evade Blofeld’s minions. Is it a great song? Should it be a Christmas standard? Maybe not…but for me it is.
Longtime followers of this site may recall that as Christmas draws nearer–and as of this posting, we’re less than ten days out–this feature shifts focus to be more and more reflective of my sentiment regarding Christmas. This is when old favorites that I love dearly start to appear in this space; this is when we reach the point of “It’s not Christmas until I hear [insert music thing here].”
I didn’t know, until fairly late in her life, that this was my mother’s favorite Christmas tune. Once she told me, I made sure to feature it every year…and now I do so in tribute. I don’t know what I believe, if anything, in terms of an afterlife, but I hope that if there is one, it’s a place where we can hear all the music we loved in life, all the time. Here you go, Mom.
Continuing our tour of music inspired at least in part by water, we have a bit of film music by the master himself: the title track from John Williams’s score to the 1984 film The River. The movie is about a family who struggles to maintain their farm and their lives beside a river in Tennessee. I’ve never actually seen the film, but the score is highly regarded. The main theme is optimistic Americana with a southern twang to it.
A harpsichord will have around 61 keys. Some more, some less.
A piano famously has 88 keys…but not always. The Bosendorfer company makes pianos with up to 97 keys.
A pipe organ can have as many as 200 keys…and adds in a full set of pitched foot pedals, and a set of controls called “stops” that control specifically where the air that makes all that sound goes.
The amount of coordination needed to perform pretty much anything on a pipe organ amazes me.
In all my classical music listening, I generally have never much devoted a lot of time to the various keyboard instruments. I love the piano, and yet music for piano represents very little of my casual listening. I generally am not much of a harpsichord fan, so unless I’m listening to a larger work that includes it in the ensemble, I almost never hear it. And then there’s the grandest of the keyboard instruments, the pipe organ.
These gigantic, grandiose instruments really are amazing things. No single musical edifice is better suited to filling a space with sound than the pipe organ; in terms of spaciousness, the pipe organ can really only be matched by the modern orchestra. Pipe organs are, of course, immobile; once built, that’s where they stay. The best chances to hear a pipe organ are obviously in church settings, though many concert halls do have one; not all, though, and many orchestras have to travel to a nearby large church if they want to perform a piece that calls for organ.
This first video is really new! It was uploaded just a few days ago and popped onto my feed Sunday morning (I continue to believe that of all the social media algorithms, YouTube’s is the best at providing stuff that I might find interesting). The music itself is a French carol called “Quand Jésus naquit à Noël”. This is a carol dating from the 1700s, as far as I can gather, and it is absolutely lively and downright joyous. Also note the instrument here: this is not the modern pipe organ with powered transfers and stops helpfully labeled with the names of instrument groupings. This instrument is the real deal: the stops are the ones you push in or pull out, depending on the need (hence the phrase, “pulling out all the stops”), and you can see the bellows working behind her. This is simply wonderful stuff.
Here, for contrast, is the modern organ in action, in a piece called “A Christmas Fantasy”. It’s very nice…but I have to admit, my preference lies with the earlier work on the vintage instrument.
By the way, my preference stated above is in no way meant to disparage the modern organ! Each organ is different, after all; each is made for its space, and you can often look up some information about them. Case in point!
You know what? Let’s revisit the artist from the first video above. What a great random suggestion by the YouTube algorithm! Sometimes that thing just nails it.
I would absolutely wear overalls to a Christmas party, were I to be invited to one…but I’d also likely not get invited to the kind of Christmas party where wearing overalls was a serious faux pas. Anyway, I always like this one.
(This is a repost from a number of years ago. I recently saw the movie Cousins for free on YouTube, so watched it over several breaks and lunches at work, as I hadn’t seen it in quite a few years. It actually holds up pretty well, and when I looked up my earlier post, I realized that I honestly wouldn’t change much of it at all, except to maybe accentuate more the point that the movie really is a fantasy of sorts, and if a situation like this movie’s came to pass in real life the participants would all need extensive therapy. Still…I love the damned movie. Here’s the post!)
(Oh, and I’m adding a new “Romance” tag, because I’m watching and reading more romance of late, so I may well find myself talking about those things in the future….)
I’m not sure if I’ve ever held forth on the movie Cousins before in this space, but I recently watched it again and wanted to flesh out my thoughts on it a bit.
Cousins is a remake of a French movie that I’ve never seen. It came out in 1988 or 1989, somewhere in there, so by this time it’s full of the kinds of fashions we like to laugh at nowadays. (Mullets and big hair, chiefly. I actually like the big hair, but the mullets, not so much.) It’s directed, very well, by Joel Schumacher, a guy who isn’t on anybody’s list of great directors but whom I think tend to produce well-made films (from a technical standpoint).
In the movie, Ted Danson plays Larry, a dance teacher who is married to Tish (Sean Young, who never looked more beautiful). Isabella Rossellini plays Maria, who is married to Tom (William Petersen, ten years before he started following the evidence). In the opening scene, Larry’s Uncle Phil marries Maria’s mother, so Larry and Maria become cousins of some sort. They also meet in the reception hall after the reception has ended, because neither is sure where their respective spouses have disappeared to. Well, it turns out Tom and Tish have been doing the dirty (Tom turns out to be quite the philanderer), and after Larry and Maria realize this, they decide to pretend to be having their own affair in order to get back at them. It’s a little joke…except they end up becoming close friends and then falling in love with one another. Hilarity ensues.
Of course, this is a remake of a French movie, so it all gets more complicated than that. Uncle Phil dies of a heart attack after being married for a couple of weeks, and then Larry’s father Vince (Lloyd Bridges, who has most of the film’s best lines) shows up and starts to woo Maria’s mother. More hilarity ensues.
It’s hard to honestly appraise a movie like this, since one must acknowledge that a state of affairs anywhere remotely resembling this one would result in all manner of emotional trauma for all concerned. (The movie does address, in passing, the effects of all this on Maria and Tom’s daughter.) But the movie itself is awfully well-made, with chemistry positively dripping between virtually every couple it shows us, so I end up looking past a lot of that. Of course Danson and Rossellini have great chemistry; the movie wouldn’t work at all if they didn’t. But so do Danson and Young, and so do Rossellini and Petersen, and so do Young and Petersen. Heck, in a couple of scenes, even Danson and Petersen have good chemistry (although as rivals). It’s also to the film’s credit that its characters do bad things without being bad people. Even Petersen’s Tom, the “cheating husband”, is a fairly low-grade jerk who is genuinely hurt when he realizes that he’s losing his wife. “Are you in love with him?” he asks; “If I am I’ll get over it,” she replies. “Yeah,” he says, in return. “We were in love once, and we got over it.” (It is kind of unfair the way the movie’s finale leaves Tom in a limbo state; we get some idea that Tish will be just fine, but Tom’s just tossed aside.)
Of course, this is a romantic comedy, so one must also judge it by if it makes one laugh, and it certainly makes me laugh. The Lloyd Bridges character has zinger after zinger (“At my age, you don’t want to get too close to an open grave”, “I’d rather have a case of the clap than a case of that wine.”), and there’s a hilarious scene set inside a wedding theme park where one of the cherubs is shown smoking behind a bush.
And the score is wonderful. Angelo Badalamenti writes a very French-sounding score (apropos, obviously), bound by two main themes: a love theme in waltz time (heard in a big way when Larry and Maria run away on Larry’s motorcycle), and a simpler, beautiful theme for Maria. In a very nice touch, Maria’s theme turns up throughout the film as diagetic music, played by street musicians as Larry and Maria wander by. The movie is also great looking, filmed in Vancouver, with lots of sweeping shots of that city’s environs. Cousins is wonderful froth, if that’s what you’re looking for.
Here’s the love theme I refer to above. I mean, isn’t this great stuff? This is easily one of my favorite movie melodies ever.
Posted inOn Movies|TaggedMovies, Romance|Comments Off on “You only have one life to live. So make it chicken shit, or chicken salad!”
My alma mater, Wartburg College, puts on a big music concert every year for Christmas. Called Christmas With Wartburg, it’s a big production that involves several, if not all, of the school’s largest music ensembles in a night of Christmas music (mostly sacred). This production was always a really big deal with a lot of work involved. When I was there, we did four performances: one at the college auditorium on Thursday night, usually the first or second Thursday after Thanksgiving, right before finals). Then a performance at a really big Lutheran church in Cedar Falls (a bigger town half an hour down the road) on Friday night, and then a performance on Saturday night at the Civic Center in Des Moines (which involved a three-hour drive). Finally we’d wrap up with one more performance on campus on the Sunday afternoon.
During the week leading up to Christmas With Wartburg there were a lot of rehearsals. The production pretty much took over our lives for a week, if not more (one year it got so intense that we jokingly started calling it “Christmas Required By Wartburg”)…and when it was all over, the world just felt kind of weird. It was very strange, having this whole thing occupy our lives and the lives of many people around us…and then we just had to go back to class the Monday after and get after the business of studying for finals and who knew what else. Looking back, there’s a dreamy quality to my Christmas With Wartburg memories. Three weekends of my life (I was not involved during my fourth year because of reasons, which may constitute a regret)…but what a handful of weekends they were.
These are performances from this year’s performance of Christmas With Wartburg. This first is the “Candlelight Carol” by John Rutter, which is one of the most beautiful things I know.
By Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=59420708
I do not remember a time in my life when I was unaware of the existence of one Richard Wayne Van Dyke. The man has just always existed, you know? Likewise, I couldn’t begin to tell you what the first thing is that I ever saw him in. It may well have been this:
But it also might have been this:
The most recent thing I’ve seen him in is this:
I can’t say that I’ve been a huge fan of Dick Van Dyke, but neither have I ever been a detractor in any way, and maybe I haven’t been a huge fan simply because I just haven’t seen as much of him as I’ve seen of other people. His presence is always a sign that happiness is still around, that good cheer is in the offing. I certainly can’t fathom anyone being bothered when he shows up. And he’s been keeping those fires burning for a hundred years.
I’ve noticed that I listen to chamber music more in the colder months than I do during the warmer. I’m not sure why that is, but maybe being inside more results in me responding more to the intimacy of good chamber music.
Arcangelo Corelli wrote a concerto grosso upon the commission by Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni, and he noted in the score that it was “made for the night of Christmas”. The work has no specific date, as it was eventually published in a posthumous collection of Corelli’s works. Nevertheless, if you’ve ever wondered what an Italian Cardinal might have been hearing musically on Christmas night in the late 17th or early 18th centuries, here you go! I like this piece a great deal.
I went to YouTube and searched under “The Night Before Christmas read by”, and obviously my hope was to find a good, solid reading of the classic poem.
